Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 21, 2006 @03:20PM
from the and-a-robot-in-every-house dept.

raghus writes "An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.
The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy — a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics." I can't wait until I can use this free energy to power my flying car and heat my aquarium of mermaids.

Ah, magnets...the never-ending source of fascination for crackpots in need of remedial highschool science. If you just arrange them in the right configuration that no-one before has tried, align them just right... After all, you can push pins and stuff around with a magnet THROUGH a table top, there has GOT to be magic in there.

I already have the patent on several "free" energy sources, but they aren't strictly free.
There's the Feline Buttered Bread Commutator for example. It operates by strapping a piece of buttered bread buttered face up to a cat's back, then dropping it from a height. Since a cat always lands on its feet and buttered bread always lands butter side down, the whole apparatus simply hovers and spins in midair. By adding a wire coil to the cat and by putting a strong magnet in close proximity, voila! Free energy.
Of course, it's not that there isn't any loss. For example, the cat needs to be fed and the bread gets stale. The cat tends to vomit occasionally, so there is some clean up involved.

Most car AC units have an energy coefficiency of somewhere around 400% - for every one watt of power used four watts of heat are removed. So having greater than 100% isn't impossible.

Actually, my physics teacher demonstrated hos to get energy out of magnets. We took a low-power LED bulb, two magnets, and a stabilizing platform to hold the magnets. We set the magnet's south poles facing each other, and wrapped the whole thing in ultra-thin cooper bell wire, which was atached to the LED and a diode. By simply pushing the magnets together the LED bulb would every now and then try to light up, it would flash but we could never keep the light on.

Don't discount it. Remember it onyl takes a tiny weak spark to get massive amounts of power out of gasoline. It just depends on what form that 'spark' comes in, and what form of 'gasoline' you're using.

"I'm also of the opinion if we started using something which was naturally in abundance, like earth's magnetic fields, it would cumulatively and ultimately affect something we'd regret later."

If we were to start tapping into the magnetic field at such a scale it would devastate the field of magnotherapy. When traditional medicine fails you, where will you turn if the magnetic fields were practically gone due excessive exploitation?

You say it's not magic, but it is magic. Ordinary devices like electronics have smoke in them. If you let the smoke out of a CPU, for example, it no longer works. In all of my experiments with magnets I have not been able to detect smoke of any kind! NO SMOKE! It's magic.

I've heard stories about made-up claims of free energy all the way back in middle school. Looks like they didn't pan out. I have little confidence in more of the same.
And yet, I'll bet a conspiracy theorist will come along and blame the failure of this magical technology on big oil hitmen.

You take a sensible approach. After all, the odds that this is real are astronomically low. But if it actually is some new miracle technology, existing energy companies will certainly try to destroy it. So you are covered either way.

It's really quite simple. You build a water wheel. Water spills on it, turning a generator. The water spills below, where a pump, powered by the generator, pumps it back onto the top of the water wheel. Voila! Instant perpetumobile!

And all these idiot scientists think there's no such thing as perpetual motion.

Man, can you BELIEVE this bullshit? This guy really wants us to believe that the Earth revolves around the SUN. It's unbelievable - I can practially watch the Sun go around the Earth, not to mention the pure and simple blasphemy that his statements bring with them.

Excommunicate this bastard NOW. Make it quick, painful, and public. We don't need a whole rash of people believing in this hogwash, undoing years of education about the creation of this planet and the Sun's role in God's plan for mankind.

Stomp him out now.

(P.S., I do believe it's hogwash, but a first-round verification can't hurt anyone but dumb-ass investors. If they've been "running it in the lab" for years, they obviously don't need cash to assemble a prototype, so let the verification go through. No harm, no foul - to us at least.)

Actually, people think of more efficient ways to do work all the time, with the result being that things are constantly getting cheaper, and the savings are being passed on to you, because of human greed.

I don't think you have to feed the cat or does the whole thing about cats landing on their feet only apply to living cats? Hmm, further testing is required. Anyone got a dead cat?

There is something disturbing about the image of this contraption though... Maybe it would be better to put the whole thing in a giant black box then it would be Schroedingers Feline Buttered Bread Commutator and it would spin endless because the cat isn't dead until you look inside the box! In your face laws of nature!

"For the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn't believe it ourselves. Over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said.

Roughly translated:

We can't *believe* how fscking stupid our neighbors are...we ran a power cord from their external outlet 3 years ago, and they haven't even noticed!

basically a set of permanent magnets that are rotated inside a wire framework. When the magnets complete one full revolution, no less than 6 rectified pulses are produced. Just by turning it at a few thousand RPM, I get 45 amps out at 14 volts - that's nearly a horsepower.

What's more, it's easy to operate. I just have it on a bracket on my car engine and spin it up with a simple little rubber belt. Mind you, the Mk 1 has a few problems to iron out - I need to find a way of enabling it to keep running when the engine stops, at the moment it stops when the engine does and I think this might be the braking effect of the drive belt. Anyone got any ideas, or know where to get in touch with Mr. Bosch whose name is on the side of it?

While we're at it, can we lambaste slashdot for bringing us this mentally putrid shit? I mean seriously, I know you're thinking "you must be may be new here," but is it too much to ask the slashdot NOT be "News for Crackpots, Radio-transmissions-from-my-teeth that matter"?!

viola. Virtually free energy.Ack! I hope we don't have to get free energy from violas! Those things sound awful!

Look, it depends on how its played. If I *have* to have someone play a viola in order to power my car to get to work, then perhaps I could chip in for lessons. Or else we could design a soundproof chamber for them to play in, possibly. You have to think creatively - that's what free energy from violas is all about.

My patented free energy device is the "Founding Fathers-Vanishing Freedoms" Commutator. Everyone knows that our Founding Fathers spin in their graves when our freedoms are taken away, so we just add a wire coil and a magnet. Every so often we have to reinstate our freedoms or the whole thing will cease to work. I'm currently investgating other ways to piss off the founding fathers so we won't have any down time.

They could hook up a big version of the device with some blades or something, let the wind push it around in order to move the different parts through the various magnetic fields - making a net positive return of energy...